Dutch team considers taking back hazardous waste

JAKARTA (JP): A team from the Dutch government began inspection of 65 containers of used plastic and other waste which came from Rotterdam and has been left unclaimed at Tanjung Priok port because they were declared illegal imports.

The four-person team was sent after Indonesia demanded that the Netherlands take them back, saying that the exports contravened an international treaty against the shipment of toxic and hazardous waste.

It remained unclear however whether the Dutch government was willing to take them back and none of the team members were willing to give any assurances yesterday.

"We've come here to show our genuine concern to deal with these problems," a member of the team said in a meeting with port, customs, police and environmental officers yesterday.

"But what we can do is to find and to make inventory of these problems and then report them to our ministry of environment and public prosecutor which in turn can sue the exporters," he said.

"To reexport this waste into our country is beyond our authority," the Dutch official said.

Three members of the team are officials of the Ministry of Environment. The fourth was from the Environmental Police Agency. All four, through their Indonesian hosts, requested anonymity and that their names not mentioned by the Indonesian press for "safety reasons".

Yesterday the team sought to match the documents they had with the container identification and during their two week mission here they will try to determine whether all the contents originated from the Netherlands or whether they had been mixed on they way to Indonesia.

"Many of them may have been mixed with waste from Florida, Hong Kong, Singapore and other places as shown in the document," a member of the team said.

The team members said that not all the 65 containers necessarily originated from their country because Rotterdam is widely used by other countries as a transit port.

The Dutch team next week will be reinforced by experts who will conduct physical examination of the waste.

The Head of Toxic and Hazardous section of the Environmental Impact Management Agency (Bapedal), Mas Nellyarti, said the Dutch team came after Indonesia sent documents of 11 shipments of hazardous containers that originated from the Netherlands.

Of the 11, the Dutch government confirmed only four as owned and exported by Dutch companies.

"We hope that the confirmed containers will be reexported as soon as possible," she said.

Some 260 containers of toxic and hazardous waste have been piled up in Tanjung Priok, and Surabaya and Medan ports since Indonesia imposed a ban on their imports in 1992.

The government has been left in a dilemma since environmental groups here oppose its plan to incinerate them while their countries of origin have been reluctant to accept them back.

The presence of unclaimed containers is also costing the Tanjung Priok Port Authority huge losses in storage fees.

Nellyarti said the government in the meantime is preparing to prosecute the Indonesian agencies which imported the waste.

Bapedal has sent the laboratory tests of eight containers containing toxic and hazardous waste as evidence to the Attorney General's office which is preparing the prosecution.

The Attorney General's office has already turned over 18 dossiers to the North Jakarta Court. (prs)